Archived entries for euscapes

Meanwhile the quickly dilapidating, empty site has become popular with urban explorers, artists and the like. In an art performance called ‘The Phantom: Romantic post-Vandalism’ (see below) the Polish artist Gomulicki carved the Bauhaus logo on the façade of the Southern building by smashing eighty windows, exploring the tension between the confidence in the future once expressed by these typologies in relation to what has become of them today. While the renovation of the building to which the Federal Police will be relocated soon is well under way, the ‘post-vandalised’ building and the pedestrian-unfriendly surrounding public space will stay as they are for the time to come. While some might perceive the RAC-CAE as one of the highest achievements of post-war urban reconstruction, the complex will also remain a prime example of ‘Brusselization’, an internationally known urban planning term for uncontrolled, divisive urban developments.

Right now is the time to stop thinking about Europe, or the Mediterranean, or our cities, as “a project.” Right now is the time to start thinking about Europe, the Mediterranean, and our cities as a vast system of conflicting wavelengths, unexpectedly resonant rhythms, and a mysterious coherence that will need a radical reformulating once again. In this retelling, we must reconcile our sometimes desperate sense of being beleaguered from outside, and our fear of the future, with a longer view of history, and with a fatalistic view of conflict, as the one thing that holds us together.

Braudel’s Donkey. Historians and the Mediterranean as a Political Project.
Wouter Vanstiphout, New Geographies 5: Mediterranean